British jobs for whom?

Frank P

Fraser

Someone should do an analysis on Britains's debt plight using this method of simplification:

*ttp://americandigest.org/mt-archives/5minute_arguments/the_debt_issue_made_simpl.php

But they won't ...

Dennis Churchill

The keys are immigration and ending unlimited duration welfare.
Immigration will not be tackled because it suits the left, who don’t believe in the concept of nationality and therefore want open borders, and the right which want unlimited, therefore cheap, labour.
In a welfare state immigration displaces the unskilled with cheaper unskilled labour in a series of waves. Pakistanis and Bangladeshis make up the highest proportion of any ethnic group in the unemployment figures. These were originally brought in to replace white British factory workers. West Indian were brought in to supply unskilled labour for public transport, their children now fill our social housing estates like the children of the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis.
We keep hearing about immigration from the EU but 80% are from outside the EU (see Alasdair Palmer’s column today’s Telegraph)
Andrew Neather told us how and why this all occurred.

Jan Cosgrove

Mr Churchill - immigration as cheap labour happened before any welfare state. Especially as it helps keep wages low. Your problem appears to be that you don't give a toss that people have to work for such wages, which do not provide enough for their basic needs. Blame the poor, as ever, be they "feckless " indigent or "hordes" of immigrants. It's bosses who pay low wages. In this town we have a lot of Poles working for such wages. Who attracted them to come here? Local workers perhaps? What conditions were they escaping, what conditions have many endured here? And so typical of the people who caused the waves of immigration, people like you are foremost now in ranting about it. Or have we forgotten what Enoch Powell that looney hypocrite was in the 1950s - Minister of Labour? Mr Churchill, the children of all the poor now fill those estates, that's what they were built for, or didn't you get it at the time? No worry now, localist nimby Britain will do its damndest to ensure that no more of this beneficence occurs, not on their doorsteps, and they have a coup-by-coalition government to do their work for them. Forget the poor if you will, erect barricades, build more prisons, crack down on welfare, don't chase tax dodgers. The poor won't forget you. You have created the divide, you want it. So reap what is to come, and it will. Britain, an oligarchy tempered by riot - 'twas said in the 19th C, and that is what it seems like still.

Archibald

There's plenty to ponder on here. I liked Alex Massie's recent blog on the topic. One instinctively feels there is a thread here linking to the riots, poor education and other recent concerns - anecdotal evidence would suggest some of the poor and less well educated feel they are not on an even playing field to some of these immigrants (rightly or wrongly, this may well just be perception or misplaced anger) while other anecdotal evidence would suggest that employers prefer to select immigrants for many positions - I hypothesized why on Massie's blog.

When you've finished shining the light of truth on these figures, will you turn your attentions to a proper debate on the EDL, standing by you conviction that such groups should perish in the sunlight?

Here, again, is their mission statement:

http://englishdefenceleague.org/about-us/mission-statement/

Surely you will agree that the rise of such groups ties in with tougher economic times and so much of this all connects together. Some of what they say may even contain some truth. Please expose them and give your readers here and/or in the magazine the proper debate we expect at the Spectator, rather than you and your colleagues simply blanket condemning with no argument.

Peter From Maidstone

Unemployment, like Housing, is essentially an immigration issue. If immigration was dealt with robustly then there would be housing, and there would be jobs for English people who are presently unemployed to be 'encouraged' into. Unless immigration is dealt with then nothing else will be.

Baron

Foreign workers get the jobs because for what they’re paid here for an hour equals to what they get at home for a day, they have to rough it, of course, can spend little or nothing on lattes, cloth themselves if need be in charity shops, still manage to save few quid, leave here, have a deposit for a flat, a car. Seen through the employers’ prism, they are also better educated than the output of the bog standard comprehensives, disciplined, hungry to succeed.

You go have a look who helps to harvest the crop in East Anglia, almost all foreign, locals don’t bother, they get benefits.

Dennis Churchill

Jan Cosgrove
August 28th, 2011 9:19pm
You have completely missed the point I was making.
The welfare state results in the unskilled not competing with the influx of immigrants because they don’t need to and there is no advantage for them doing so. Without immigrant labour, in the numbers we have seen in the last decade, wages would have had to increase simply from supply and demand pressure.
You seem to be suggesting that a small island like Britain, in fact a small area of that small island: South East England can absorb virtually limitless population increases.
English cities are increasingly socially and culturally fragmented and the situation will get worse.
I also think that a large welfare state can only exist in a culturally homogenous society. People will not pay high taxes to support groups they have little in common with.

Dennis Churchill

Archibald
August 28th, 2011 9:27pm
You will not get a balance view on British or English Nationalism while the National Union of Journalists’ Guidelines does not allow it.
Even without the Guidelines no journalist is going to support these groups for the simple reason it would damage their career.

perdix

Labour's policy on untrammelled immigration was firstly for new votes but also in the case of Eastern Europe a quid pro quo for supplying troops for Iraq (at Blair's request).

Occasional Ostrich

@Jan Cosgrove 9:19pm

Have you thought of asking yourself how the immigrants live on such low wages, and still manage to send cash home?

2trueblue

We actually encourage people to be dependant on their benefits. Recently whilst staying at a hotel where most of the staff were foreign well presented effiient, well mannered a member of staff had refused to work extra shifts during one of the busiest weekends of the year. The reason? He would lose some of his benefit is he worked over 16hrs a week. How can we cure the problem where the man is working, but sees his loyalty to the DHSS rather than his employer. Hard to cure our disease, reliance on benefits has bred a lack of need to work and a lack of will to think it is important.

Liebore were and are happy with the situation they have creaated as it ensures their client base voter. They increased child poverty in their 13yrs. when we should have managed to do the reverse. They had an agenda to expand their client state and were not concerned, in fact they revelled in the fact that they were altering how the country was made up, and left nothing solid or cohesive to make it work. They do not and did not care and for that Bliar/Brown/Liebore should be brought to book. Liebore thought that if they continually repeated something that we would think that something was actually happening. BBC did the job for them and we were all told it so often that some believed it.
The sad thing is that no one will call it. We had/have a supine media which is inexperienced and have no real gravitas and our politicians are drawn form the same stable. In essence none of them have the capability of offering us a way out, they have come up with little or no experience of the real world.

Gerald Raho

It seems ludicrous in a country with 2½ million unemployed that our politicians are not taking immediate measures to stop the increase in immigration (presently at 21%). I think most people would agree that at least one of the main reasons why we have discontent, riots and young people hanging around on our streets and getting up to no good, is directly a result of this unemployment; so why have our politicians chosen not to solve the root of the problem and get the country back to work? In this context, you would think that a sharp increase in the numbers of immigrants coming into the country, all of whom will be looking for work and will thereby undoubtedly make the unemployment situation worse, would be seen as a problem? Apparently not. It is unlikely that the UK will ever accept anything other than a capital-based economy, where the ‘haves’ decide how much of the cake the ‘have-nots’ are allowed, then our politicians must then at least ensure that there is a healthy balance between employment and distribution of wealth. Even the greediest of capitalists knows that this, in the long term, is more beneficial than social disorder.

Rhoda Klapp

Just a comment about the IPPR suggestions. They are wrong. I haven't been to a jobcentre for a few decaeds now, but I know people who have. People made redundant and kids out of school. They all regard the experience as demoralising. They suspect it is intentionally so. The real point is that the first day you walk into the JC you are at your most employable. You are in the habit of work, or bright-eyed and bushy-tailed if a school leaver. Then you wait. Then you talk to some apparatchik who is not interested in you and hasn't got any jobs to give you, and who furthermore is measured on getting long-termers into work. The least employable people get all the attention and any job opportunities or meaningful training are offered to them, to avoid them going on to the long-term list, which is the thing which must be reduced. The job centre does not work efficiently at getting people back to work. It works to reduce the long-term list by any means necessary, and that means sending them on useless courses which fail to equip you for jobs that don't exist anyway. What do the courses achieve then? They reset the clock. That is all they have to do to satisfy the JC. They take people back to square one on the list. It's a stupid useless game and doesn't do what we think it should. And the IPPR want to make it worse, and the tories want to put private companies into the mix so they can fiddle the figures whatever way works for them and make a few bob.

Well, Rhoda, what would work? I don't know, but it strikes me that the first contact of the unemployed person with the JC is the time to get them right out there into work. The best time. Everything about that first contact should be positive and encouraging. But right now that is counter to the established regime.

Sorry for the long post, it is a hobby-horse of mine.

anne allan

A certain number of long term unemployed Brits are in that position by dint of their own actions - or rather inaction.
Recently, my sons were recruiting for staff in their frozen food factory; not the most glamorous of jobs, but one that pays over the minimum wage.
As ever, any British applicants either did not turn up for interviews, or, if they did, were practically illiterate and innumerate.
If they bothered to appear for their trial day (we realise that food manufacturing is not for everybody), they wimped out after an hour or two.
Our new staff are retired Gurkhas, Polish and Indian.

Dennis Churchill

If we work from the assumption that workers and employers are rational then the situation becomes clearer. Can you expect a worker receiving in benefits, say, £15K and not working to pick fruit for the same amount? So how much would attract them to fruit picking? £20K £25K how much would you require?
The farmer needing to pay £20K may not be able to sell his produce as cheaper imports would be available so the farmer would have to find other uses for his fields
The same logic applies to other unskilled areas such as office cleaning. The employer needs to win contracts against competition so can only pay the industry norm but why should anyone clean offices for less ,or the same amount, as they would receive staying at home watching day time TV?
The solution? Immigrant labour with lower expectations and more limited access to welfare.
As I wrote above each “wave” adds to the problem.
Immigration is a short term fix .Our political class have kicked the can down the road but it will be our children and grandchildren that will need to deal with a problem so large it won’t be ignorable.
Their inheritance from us will be a fragmented society with a large underclass of virtually unemployable people of various ethnic and cultural backgrounds and a tax base that will no longer be able to support a welfare state of the type we have now. Not the type of society where democracy thrives is it?

Minnie Ovens

"second highest rate of net job creation in the G7

It would be interesting to see how many of these jobs were created by the increased infrastructure needed to handle the increase in immigration.
In effect, are we just importing a majority of people who then get jobs looking after these imports.
Over two years ago, a Labour funded research unit visited the Churchill Estates in Pimlico to determine what was top of the household's concerns.
Far above everything else came Immigration and Housing.
Yet, whether Labour or Conservative or Coalition, there seems no urgent wish by Parliament or Whitehall to address these concerns.
No wonder The Establishment is held in such contempt and disgust. Rightfully.

Minnie Ovens

Jan Cosgrove
August 28th, 2011 9:19pm
You have completely missed the point I was making.

Mr Churchill, I think Ms Cosgrove lost the point many years ago, poor dear.

David Cockerham

Mr Cosgrove manges to believe at one and the same time that poor East Europeans are flooding to the UK because they are downtrodden and miserable their own countries,and that the UK is a place where the poor are and always have been downtrodden and miserable. Surely something wrong here somewhere? And does he not ask himself why our own downtrodden miserable poor don't themselves flood to lands of greater opportunity elsewhere within the EU like the Poles etc do?

lomasekto

In a Dublin bar last weekend I overheard a group of Irishmen discussing Britain. They spoke for a longish time, exchanging comments that seemed to me both informed and intelligent. They concluded:
The British government is at war with its own people and when the people wake up to the fact - which will take a bloody miracle- there will be trouble such as England has not seen since Cromwell.

Publius

There are certain modern liberal fantasies that need to be revisted and examined.

They are linked. But I list them separately.

1.
The view that every nation or region must inevitably be better than another nation or region at at least one economically enriching activity.

2.
Globalisation and its corollary world government, the ill effects of which can be observed in minature in the EU, and more widely in the present financial mess.

3.
The dubious view that everyone has the potential to become a 'knowledge worker'

4.
The inherent immobility of most people, when one considers them as whole people and not merely as economic units

5.
What constitutes a good society.

These are not questions for economists or our present dire crop of politicians, both of whom merely go with the flow - like lemmings.

Ruby Duck

What Rhoda said so well.

And ..

Shoving the responsibility for finding work on to school leavers and people ground down by years of rejection and failure only serves to grow the DWP client base and enhance the job prospects of those working in it.

The Job Centres should be doing what the name suggests ie. supplying labour. Bidding for seasonal/temporary contracts. Competing with agencies bringing in immigrant labour. Undercutting them if necessary.

A couple of weeks picking fruit grows a lot more self-confidence than a lifetime of back-to-work training.